GDC 09: Big Huge Games' RPG Project

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Lead designers discuss missteps and a few features.

By Charles Onyett

Big Huge Games' Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson were at the Game Developers Conference 2009 to talk about the dangers of scope and ambition when designing a game, with a focus on open world role-playing titles and frequent references to their current RPG project. During the talk they pointed out the recent news about publisher THQ's move to shut them down, though elected not to go into any detail.

Despite the ominous circumstances, the session had a more upbeat feel thanks to the banter between the two.

"Ken is, as he will tell you any time you speak to him, an internationally celebrated game designer. He has been doing this since the dawn of time," said Nelson. "He designed stone tablets to begin. Paranoia, RuneQuest, D&D, he writes WFRP which I had to ask, and turns out is Warhammer. And he was of course the lead designer on Morrowind, Oblivion, and our current big huge CRPG. You know Ken's old because he still calls them CRPGs."

Then it was Rolston's turn. "[Mark Nelson] was a designer with me on Morrowind and and on Oblivion. He did some work on Fallout and he was actually the lead designer on the expansion [to Oblivion], The Shivering Isles. He's now the actual lead designer on the game we're doing because I will not do any work." The last comment drew out a round of laughter from the audience.

The session primarily served as a warning to those who might try to set grand goals with any kind of role-playing product without understanding what might be involved in getting it done. It comes down to being able to limit the vision and the structure of the team, they said, and ensuring you know your employees' habits, to what degree they need to be managed, and how to bring out their strengths. The two said they'd made mistakes in several categories since beginning work at Big Huge Games.

It seems the initial idea for their RPG project was to make it a sprawling, genre-bending experience. "We tried to do a mid-stream change on our IP," said Rolston. "I admittedly had a proposal that was kind of risky, but in the long-run since it didn't prove out, I had a plan B that was going to work. And then plan B didn't work…I still think I should have stuck by that plan B."

Nelson and Rolston were having fun trading barbs for the duration of the talk. "[Rolston] is a top person in the industry when it comes to world building and setting and theme, wouldn't know fun if it bit him in the ass, cooked him a dinner, wrote him a thank you note, sent him a Facebook invite, anything, it's just not a strong suit of his. While he had these ideas and they were visionary, they would have sucked. As it was part of our vision not to suck, it was one of our very first bullet points, we had to move on to something new."

Nelson went on to describe the original plans for the RPG title. "We were trying to make an RPG, it was going to have some strategy in it because Big Huge Games was founded on RTS, and had some of this Dynasty Warriors big battle simulation going on. This was never going to work, you can't make three games at the same time. It was trying to be too much and it was never going to be true to its own identity. We had to make these mid-stream revisions in order to get the game moving forward."

The two had to refocus on making strictly an RPG, their area of expertise. They had to engage in what Rolston called 'blunder management.' They had to push past the inclination to continue along an incorrect path out of fear of losing the production time a restructuring would require.

"It's silent complicity," said Rolston. "I want to give support because I used to be a teacher and…you need to inspire people and you need to keep their effective domain warm. So I kept trying to make that work and I did it with a person which, in theory, I should always be fighting with [referring to Nelson]. For some reason, I forgot to savage him on a regular basis."

Nelson started up with, "This midstream switch I think that I actually have to take a lot of the blame on because while I pick on Ken for not knowing what fun is, I suffer from the absolute opposite problem. I find everything really fun…I really think the problem started earlier on when I forgot to mention to Ken that his idea was terrible. I think I should have mentioned it when I first interviewed in fact. We tried big battles in Oblivion and if any of you played it you may remember the battle of Bruma. The battle had about eight people in it and their AI was turned off. That's what allowed it to run. Big battles, they weren't something we were going to get to work right."

So to fix this, they had to reopen the lines of communication and be critical of the project's direction. This had to be done across the entire studio, not just with Rolston and Nelson. Other strategies for revitalization included making key new hires that would maintain creative energy and ensuring their staff stayed focused.

"We were used to working at Bethesda," said Nelson, a company Rolston described as being 'like jazz.' "We were used to working with folks who were used to making RPGs and were used to having success with it. What we failed to do was pay close enough attention to who our designers were, what they wanted to do, what they were good at, and really set them up for success." Despite some internal struggles, some of the issues were addressed and the project moved forward.

Though not many details were given out on what the game might be like, Rolston talked briefly about what he considers to be important. He noted that creating factions, while not initially in the design for this project, is an effective method of generating interesting characters and story. Nelson added in part of the problem of what they wound up doing was writing way too much text that didn't lead into game systems, meaning it didn't translate into a fun experience.

"The real reason we didn't put factions in," said Rolston, "is that we made the decision that we wanted to have a streamlined RPG because we were trying to find a blue ocean strategy. We didn't actually want to copy the work that we'd done before, so we were trying to organize an experience around a very linear main narrative. And deliberately, to avoid complicating things, we stripped out factions. It turns out we were good at factions, we were expected to have them, so it sucked if we didn't do it."

Nelson dug into the issue of the drawbacks of trying to make a streamlined RPG. "I think we made a mistake trying to make RPG 'lite.' We had this idea that we could strip out all this stuff that isn't necessary for the player to see. He doesn't need to see all those numbers on the screen, he doesn't need to see every stack on his piece of armor, every stack on his weapon. We failed to remember that RPG players like that stuff. That's the stuff that makes RPGs kind of rich, kind of fun. I want to look at those stupid numbers. Yes, they clutter up the screen, and I know it offends the artists and it offends the UI guys, they say 'do we have to put so much information on there?' Yeah, we do."

Moving on to dialogue, Nelson said they surveyed a number of systems before coming to a decision. "We looked at the Oblivion kind of menu system, we looked at the BioWare cinematic dialogue system. They have their own constraints and weaknesses, but it took us a long time to come to the place where it was a bit of a hybrid between the two, using topics for some areas and for important choice moments going to the more cinematic BioWare style."